Harold Meyerson

Recent Articles

For a moment there, it almost looked as if the Democrats were getting their act together. Leaders of the key Democratic constituency groups have begun meeting to develop a strategy and the wherewithal for winning the battleground states in the 2004 presidential election. On May 8 the president of Emily's List, Ellen Malcolm, hosted a gathering of the heads of various environmental, pro-choice, civil rights and labor organizations to look at how they could have the greatest impact in next year's race. (The gathering was a tribute, in its way, to the regular meetings of conservative leaders hosted by anti-tax zealot Grover Norquist.) The centerpiece of the May 8 meeting was a presentation by Steve Rosenthal, until recently director of the AFL-CIO's political program and now director of the labor-backed Partnership for America's Families. The Partnership is one of myriad so-called 527s -- the tax code designation for organizations that are springing up now that campaign reform has banned...

Europe wants an army. Tony Blair wants a European rapid deployment force that can work through NATO in concert with the United States to build "one polar power" that spans the Atlantic. Jacques Chirac, Gerhard Schroeder and the leaders of Belgium, Greece and Luxembourg -- the continent's leading critics of the war with Iraq -- want a rapid deployment force to be the military arm of a distinct European Union (EU) foreign and security policy. They want to get that force up and running by next year, and to establish a headquarters for the command in Belgium. But Belgium, as the Bush administration has noted with some asperity, is already home to the headquarters of NATO. To both the State and Defense departments, the idea of plunking an alternative to NATO just down the block from our own alliance must seem more devilish French mischief. Europe's desire for a continental strike force, however, antedates its current rift with the United States. It derives in part from Europe's shame at...

So whose books were more cooked -- Enron's accounts of its financial doings or the administration's prewar reports on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction? Enron's books didn't lack for detail. They were simply and deliberately fictitious. They documented all manner of energy sales and swaps that in fact never transpired but that had to be conjured up retrospectively to explain how Enron's apparent assets and profits were so dazzling. The administration's accounts of the Iraqi arsenal were also detailed. Descriptions of Saddam Hussein's weapons caches were the centerpiece of the president's State of the Union address and the sum and substance of Colin Powell's presentation to the UN Security Council. The secretary told the council there was convincing evidence that Iraq had hundreds of tons of chemical and biological agents and that it had been buying uranium from Niger to put its nuclear program on fast-forward. But yesterday's certitude is today's confusion. Task Force 75 -- the armed...

The problem with socialism, noted Oscar Wilde, that most social of socialists, was that it took "too many evenings." It's the left that's always been committed to the permanence of politics, to continual deliberation and decision-making. Conservatism, by contrast, promises fewer evenings lost by leaving more decisions to the market and fewer to the realm of political choice. Part of conservatism's appeal is that now and then, in the lives of ordinary people, there's an end to politics, or at least periodic vacations. Well, that's the theory. In practice, in American politics today, it's the right that pushes politics into absurd overtimes. In California, Republicans want to rerun last fall's gubernatorial election by waging a campaign to recall the recently reelected Gray Davis. In Texas last week, Tom DeLay tried unsuccessfully to reopen the state's decennial reapportionment process, which was signed, sealed and codified last year. In each instance, Republicans abruptly announced the...

Economists are admitting to confusion, always a bad sign. The American economy has entered "a baffling twilight zone," writes Robert J. Samuelson. "People yearn for clarity and confidence, while the new stagnation provides mainly uncertainty and contradiction." The Federal Reserve seems particularly vexed. Profits and productivity are up, but growth is negligible and employment is down. The Fed's governors have been cutting interest rates since January 200112 separate cuts, taking interest rates on overnight bank loans from 6.5 percent down to 1.25 percent, the lowest level in 40 yearsyet the layoffs keep coming. Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan has been predicting recovery, but recovery hasn't appeared. Testifying before Congress in late April, Greenspan prophesied a better second half of 2003. "I think it includes jobs," he said. Companies, the Fed complains, aren't expanding as they should. "An undercurrent of pessimism has persisted among business leaders for some time now...